The Cooking Critic

My father had a request for Father’s Day: a story about his father. Surprised, I asked, “A non-fiction story?” “Of course a non-fiction story,” he replied. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I was so confused—people order up stories from me all the time. If I can create an article on bathroom fixtures, a boring subject I know nothing about, surely I could write a memoir about my grandfather, a man infinitely more interesting than bathroom fixtures. Still, it was a daunting task to pull off a decent gift of a story about someone so close to me in just over a week. But here’s Dad’s promised story. And here he is with me on the first day of being a father (or maybe the second)—he’d like you to think that he did all the work and my mother was just there to take pictures:

To give this piece some focus, I determined I’d cook a food in honor of my grandfather (who my brother and I called Daddy Drew when were young and just Drew as we got older). The foods that came to mind were: gumbo, mincemeat pie and dog food, in that order. Gumbo because of his Cajun heritage, but then, the month of June doesn’t exactly shout out for a hearty stew served over rice, even with the dank overcastness we’ve had lately and especially with the pounding heat that followed. Then I contemplated a mincemeat pie, a dish often made with dried fruit preserves and no actual meat. I was surprised when I discovered Drew’s affinity for this dish a few years ago, especially since I recently had encountered this dessert in Wales and was so put off by the word “mincemeat,” I didn’t even try it. I can’t say the thought of making one is anymore appealing to me now, although I’ve since tasted it and discovered that there were, in fact, no traces of meat in it. But if I’m going to spend time in the kitchen creating a pie, it certainly isn’t going to be filled with mincemeat. After rejecting making a mincemeat pie, dog food came to mind because Drew once claimed to have eaten it and that “it didn’t taste too bad.” But then again, Drew was known for tall tales. That and big sneezes. And an extremely competitive nature that kept my brother and I from ever beating him at ping pong. But since I wasn’t about to do any experiment cooking with dog food, I decided to write about carrots. Because he hated them, and I did too for a long time, and it was strangely bonding.

Carrots typically showed up at Sunday suppers at my grandparents, and Drew would simply ignore us when we’d jokingly suggest he eat some. I too turned my nose up at carrots for a long time. I think I refused the puréed version as a baby, which carried into an aversion towards cooked carrots and their mushy texture as an adult. I’ll eat cooked carrots now if they’re served, but I can’t say I ever go back for seconds. Raw or barely cooked carrots are a completely different story for me, but I don’t know if Drew’s dislike of carrots had nuances.

So I began my quest for a carrot recipe both Drew and I might have liked. I flipped through my recipe books and found a carrot terrine— “a ter-what?” he would have said. A response that it was a cold, molded pâté probably would have gotten an “I don’t know about that.” Then I came across a carrots Vichy recipe, which is traditionally made with water from Vichy, France. This would have been met with strong opposition—my grandfather was a man who fundamentally opposed bottled water since perfectly good water came out of the tap. Requesting a specific bottled water would have prompted stories about growing up during The Great Depression. Next I considered a carrot soup, a light delicate thing that I was surprised to find I enjoyed when served it at a wedding, but Drew simply would have skipped that course of the meal. In the end I determined the best dish to make with carrots was a carrot cake, a cop-out if ever there was one.

Still, my decision to make a Super-Moist Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting wasn’t completely void of logic. Drew was a man, after all, with a fierce sweet tooth; cookies tended to disappear when they were in his house, and he didn’t seem to mind the nickname Cookie Monster at all. I reasoned, too, he might have liked carrot cake since it has some vaguely similar qualities to mincemeat pie, both being spice-heavy and not overly sweet (if you just forget about that cream cheese frosting for a while.) Also, carrot cake isn’t strange and foreign. It would have been far easier to get him to eat a cake than a terrine.

True to its name, this carrot cake was moist, and my friends raved—thankfully since some mishaps were involved in making it (the frosting oozed out of the center and the top layer of cake started sliding to the right all because of the heat in my un-air-conditioned apartment). But would Drew have liked it? It’s hard to say. He was stubborn in both his likes and dislikes. He was opposed to anything unnecessarily fancy—the carrot cake is borderline on this front, made from the humble carrot but whipped into a two-layer cake appropriate for special occasions. Had he seen my kitchen after making the cake, he would have grumbled about how he didn’t understand why it was necessary to use every bowl in the house, but then he would have started doing the dishes without another word.

But I think, like the cookies, the cake might have disappeared when we weren’t looking.

Drew (1920-2006) with my brother